Civil rights advocates are raising concerns about the Trump administration's idea to roll back anti-discimination rules -- insisting these decades-old provisions that prohibit discrimination in employment and housing are also an effective way to combat bias in artificial intelligence.

NAACP Legal Defense Fund President Sherrilyn Ifill slammed the Trump administration after a leaked internal Justice Department memo revealed officials were considering ways to scale back or remove so-called "disparate impact requirements." Ifill noted that these rules saying actions that disproportionately impact protected groups can be considered discriminatory -- even if that was not the intent -- take on even more importance in the AI era.

"This is precisely the moment in which the Trump administration is trying to get rid of disparate impact, when in fact disparate impact is one of the most important tools we have in the employment context and housing and other areas," she said. "But particularly, it has the power to be incredibly useful in the AI field, where essentially what you need to do is figure out how is this instrument you're using working, what is the result it's producing and then be able to work our way from there to understand if there's bias in the instrument."

Policymakers are increasingly worried about the potential for algorithms to unfairly discriminate against people. Ifill's comments put a fine point on a dilemma for lawmakers - who are trying to understand where laws already on the books could be applied to combat bias in artificial intelligence, and where they might fall short and need new safeguards. Any significant change to civil rights law could make the problem even more complex.

Technologists say bias is often a result of the data sets the tools are trained on. Last year, for instance, Amazon had to shut down an AI recruiting tool because it was discriminating against women. The company realized the system was doing this because it had been trained on a decade of résumés submitted to the company - which were disproportionately from men, as is often the case in the technology industry. (Amazon founder and chief executive Jeff Bezos owns The Post.)

But many in industry are skeptical that Washington will be up to the challenge. After seeing lawmakers struggle to grasp basic tech concepts during hearings with executives like Mark Zuckerberg, Bari Williams, an executive at Bay Area start-up All Turtles, said at CES in Las Vegas that she doesn't know if they'll be able to take on the complex task of regulating bias in algorithms.

"You cannot set policy and regulation if you don't understand how it works," Williams said.

Brian Schatz, D-Hawaii, has proposed legislation to give more authority, staff and resources to the Federal Trade Commission, which could be one way to ensure the federal government can extend more oversight of new ways technology can harm consumers, including bias in artificial intelligence. The provisions were included in a privacy bill he introduced last year, which has gained broad support among Senate Democrats, but it has no Republican co-sponsors.

Sunmin Kim, who is a technology adviser to Schatz, told CES attendees on Thursday that policymakers need to look at whether bias is playing out in new tools, such as price targeting. E-commerce companies are increasingly trying to get customers to pay as close to their maximum price as possible by offering different customers different prices based on their geographic location, or age. Although this technology might be good for commerce, Kim said, more oversight is needed to see whether companies are determining prices on the basis of race or other protected categories.

In addition to more oversight, Kim thinks the government can help address bias in the training data sets that shape the algorithms. Last month, Congress passed the Open Government Data Act, which aims to make every government data asset available to the public in a machine-readable format. Kim said these data sets may provide less biased data for algorithms to train on. The bill is awaiting President Donald Trump's signature.

As lawmakers grapple with the steps they can take to rein in bias in artificial intelligence, panelists at CES made it clear the onus also needs to be on the companies to be more transparent.

Kim said her office has started to push the companies to tell them more about their algorithms - something technology businesses often resist because the algorithms are important intellectual property.

"As they make more and more decisions," she said, "it's not unreasonable for the government to ask, 'What's inside the black box?' "

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Video: NAACP Legal Defense Fund President and Director-Counsel Sherrilyn Ifill says we need to tackle the difficult conversations that come with AI and end any defensiveness on questions of built-in bias.(Washington Post Live)